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  • Thing is, they're partially right. Revolution means war and war is violent. Innocent people will be murdered. Sick children. Homeless people. The elderly. Perfectly healthy random people. Pets, wild animals, you name it. Stuff that shouldn't have to die will die. That's the nature of war.

    The reason it's still worth it is that we're already at war. It's just that largely only one side is waging that war. Innocent people are being murdered under the status quo every single day. Sick children, homeless people, the elderly, perfectly healthy random people, pets, wild animals, you name it. They're already being murdered. Revolution only looks violent and unreasonable from the privileged position that the status quo isn't violent.

  • Man it's a good thing structural violence isn't a thing. Otherwise incremental reform (or more honestly, its vain pursuit under bourgeois democracy) would have its own death toll that is being assumed as the normal, immutable state of things

  • Why do people think the revolution is one singular magical eschatological even that will happen everywhere at the same time, and involves destryoing everything? Why did i believe that at one point? Where did that idea come from and why does it persist?

    • Not reading history outside of fantasized media

      • This, only revolution you see in mass media/consciousness in the west puts it forth as some sort of pseudomaterialist rapture. When really history isn't quite linear and easy, you could say revolutions began long before its obvious and it doesn't matter what precious pearl-clutching scratched libs think, we're already in several. You'll get all sorts of flavors of slow and steady and quick fascistic collapse, which is what they desire in their scratched lil dark heart.

    • Christian brainworms i think

  • Dual power? Never heard of it.

    Also, the cajones on someone saying only the privileged support revolution when it revolutions have only happened in the most destitute places on Earth.

    • This is what you get when your idea of a revolution exists in a vacuum with no events preceding it or material conditions facilitating it.

      This would be the best argument against revolution if revolutions occurred spontaneously after enough people believed in it.

      It also assumes all life and society just comes to a screeching hault when the government changes hands. Until checks start bouncing, most people are just going to continue going to work and doing their jobs as normal.

    • Why is someone up in the sky screaming "unfalsifiable orthodoxy?" What could the yellow sky man mean by that?

  • “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” -Mark Twain

    -Happybadger

  • before you start a revolution, you have to submit detailed plan and schedule of your movements to your local fbi headquarters, so that they can ensure steady workings of proletarians (who will otherwise crumble into ash when shareholders can't answer their emails)

    • also also, think of the poor babies of the plantation owners, who didn't get to see their daddy

      • With all sincerity, emphasis, and contempt, fuck them kids. They'll probably just grow into aggrieved gusanos by the time all is said and done.

  • Those people are currently dying and would be saved by a revolution. They just described what's happening right now.

    • EXACTLY. we need to build new systems of care because the american system fails and eventually kills everyone below the morality line

      these new systems WILL be violently opposed, which will require self defense.

  • Soooo, these people think the American revolution was a bad thing? The Haitian revolution? French Revolution? Do they think the Vietnamese should have just rolled over and been content with being French subjects because otherwise the supply of baguettes might have been interrupted? Once again, libs love every prior revolution and hate the idea of the revolution around the corner.

  • Another great example about how disconnected the average westerner is from the material condition that most of the world faces. If you even take a second to look at the conditions that were necessary to preempt revolutions like that seen in China, Russia, Haiti, or as we see now the resistance of the Palestinians it becomes quite clear the question is not whether there will be medicine for sick children or whether child support comes through. The reality is that there will be NO hospitals and NO organization to even process the concept of child support. The liberal tendency to put the cart before the horse and insert their idealized concept of revolution into what they think revolutionary times might look like is what I personally see as one of the greatest divides in thought between them and some of the older relatives in my family I have had the chance to talk to. For my older relatives that lived through the war and revolution it was do or die. Just goes to show how far away any real chance of revolution is here in the west.

    • The liberal tendency to put the cart before the horse and insert their idealized concept of revolution into what they think revolutionary times might look like is what I personally see as one of the greatest divides in thought between them and some of the older relatives in my family I have had the chance to talk to.

      the young-adult dystopia novel industry has been a disaster for the human race

  • Every time i see some navel-gazing horseshit like this out of comfortable, overprivileged crackers like these, all I can think is that nah, fuck all the bullshit; Amerikans are absolutely acceptable collateral when shit pops off. Because it will pop off, and it will not be the left that gets it popping. We are going to have to fight a war that will be brought to us. We are going to have to bleed fascists dry; and it's specifically because the bloated, overprivileged larvae of the professional managerial class, that expected to grow into nepobaby sinecurials, couldn't be bothered to wake up, grow up, and realize that they're ACTUALLY in the same slowly-boiling pot as all the rest of us.

    And half of them will sell us out when that time comes, to preserve the comfort and 'peace' that they put over everyone else's agony. That they paper over the unpleasantries of their life with. They won't even think about what happens to us after they make that call.

    Nah, they wanna talk about 'they're not acceptable collateral'? No. Every settler; every colonizer's son, every colonizer's daughter, is acceptable collateral. More than enough of my people have been lynched to justify it. These Amerikans have never been on any kind of motion that isn't "making sure the treat dispenser is still running at the expense of 'the minorities' that they'd have a HEART ATTACK if they saw moving into their neighborhoods". These are not my allies. These are not my comrades. These are not my countrymen.

  • I fucking hate tumblr left anti-communists (liberals)

    • I think they're the single most frustrating type of liberal. They're the closest to "getting it" among all the liberals because many of them are queer and/or women and so have experienced real oppression unlike many in the Reddit crowd, which is largely male and techbro-aligned. When I occasionally interact with them, I just want to make them read State and Revolution (or the equivalent anarchist text, both Marxism and anarchism are superior to liberalism) because many of them do just need that final push out of liberal orthodox thinking into a better and more explanatory ideology.

      But their closeness to the truth in terms of how society is patriarchal and this needs to be changed and a more queer society created (albeit without a Marxist feminist understanding) makes it all the more frustrating when people like those in the image above come along and confidently assert that revolutions shouldn't be done because they lead to innocent people dying because they haven't even heard of the concept of structural violence, or other excuses for not adopting a revolutionary approach. Their automatic dismissal of totalitarian tankies who want to redistribute your toothbrush as well as the dismissal of anarchists for having too lofty/unrealistic a goal, ultimately leads to them navel-gazing uselessly in a corner somewhere or, at best, attempting the entirely pointless task of pushing elected officials to the left, and thus they're on the side of the fascist status quo.

  • This might be a reasonable concern if the current governments weren't already killing and causing suffering en masse.

    Why is my life right now considered "acceptable collateral" but revolution to solve that is wrong?

  • I love how these self described "leftists" and "progressives" only ever say things that serve to reinforce the idea that nothing should or can change. Regardless of if these things are true or not, at the end of the day the function of these statements is to reinforce the status quo. Yet these dipshits will claim to be progressive, to want change. Don't buy it for a fucking second. They're privileged enough to live in a world that seems "peaceful" to them, and that's all they care about. They want that world to stay exactly the same, "safe" for them at any cost to anyone else. The irony is the violence they think doesn't occur under the status quo is coming for them too, it's coming for us all.

    • I do wonder if they think similarly about potential revolutions in the state-designated Bad Countries like Iran, Russia, China, the DPRK, etc. They'd still be dipshits, but I could at least give them a small point for consistency if they also believe that, say, we shouldn't try and create a revolution in Iran or Russia because innocent people would die. I very much doubt they would, though; that's probably "different" to the situation in the US (read: the lives of foreigners and minorities are worth so little to them that even incredibly violent revolutions where millions die would be worth it to install a comprador regime friendly to Western megacorporations)

      • no they definitely would be happy if a colour revolution happened in Iran, reddit reposter is an israeli zionazi

      • Of course not, they salivate on the mere prospect because authoritarism blah blah. They all agree with Chumpsky saying "The fall of Soviet Union was the victory for socialism". Anyone saying this after witnessing last 33 years is at best completely ignorant.

  • Dumbass uses the database analogy, but apparently has never encountered the situation where a database is fundamentally ill-equipped to handle the task you require, and attempts to bolt on band aids will result in collapse of the database.

  • I think about how if the revolution doesn't happen then 10s of thousands of people will continue to die due to lack of basic services like healthcare and food and transportation and heating and housing on an ongoing basis every single year.

  • How would i buy a lenin funko pop in the middle of a revolution? You haven't considered actual praxis in your argument

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